This finely designed volume was published by Godine in 2021, three years after Donald Hall’s death.  The book’s journey began in 1978 when Hall published “Remembering Poets” in which he wrote of his personal experiences with four poets:  Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound.  Fourteen years later, he added chapters on Marianne Moore and one that combined his reminiscences of two more writers, Archibald MacLeish and Ivor Winters.  That book, as best I can tell, has been reproduced without changes in this volume.

The book is difficult to classify.  Is it a memoir?  Is it a series of biographies?  Is it literary criticism? Is it a history of modernism in poetry?  It is, I believe, all of these and more.

Hall is one of my very favorite writers, a man I met in 1971 in Ann Arbor where I was a medical student and he a professor at the U. of Michigan.  After encountering him again at a poetry reading somewhere in New England a few years later, we began a correspondence which lasted more than 40 years sharing opinions on poetry, the weather, and the Red Sox.  He was an entertaining and reliable correspondent replying in just days with a typewritten letter bearing the heading Eagle Pond Farm with his corrections and additions made in black ink.

Over the years, I’ve read just about everything he has written, experiencing his move from the university to his grandparents’ farm in rural NH, his marriage and then devastating loss of Jane Kenyon, and his essays written as he approached ninety looking back on a life well-lived.

In this book, we learn of Hall’s early years in which he had incredible access to the leading poets of Modernism.  An early visit to Bread Loaf in Vermont where Frost held forth was followed by his college days at Harvard where he was the editor of the ‘Advocate’, the literary journal at the College.  He held a similar role during his two years at Oxford, and his four years as a Junior Fellow back at Harvard were followed by a year at Stanford as Ivor Winter’s student.  That preparation  led to his work at the Paris Review where he was an early practitioner of the author interview.  All of these settings provided him with the opportunities to sit for hours with these giants of Modernist poetry.  In addition, as an undergraduate at Harvard he brushed shoulders with an amazing group of future poets.

This book is aptly subtitled ‘reminiscences’ and ‘opinions’ since Hall shares his personal experience with each of these seven poets providing examples of their poetry to support those observations.  I thoroughly enjoyed this opportunity to spend more time with this old friend, and learning about the personal details, work habits, and lifestyles of these Modernist poets was illuminating as well.  Perhaps the best chapter was the one on Marianne Moore, a poet whose work I intend to explore in more detail.  Another interesting connection was learning that T.S. Eliot gave the Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1932, since we are in the midst of this year’s Nortons being given by Sir Steve McQueen, another Brit.

If you love Hall as I do or are simply interested in this fascinating group of poets, this is a fine book.  Godine has, as usual, done a beautiful job with the cover, the paper, and the font.